Untraceable
by a-MAXiMINalist
Summary: She inherited Caleb Dume's hyper-inquisitiveness. It hadn't occurred to Kanan to really think over Caleb Dume's heritage. One-shot. Post-Empire.
_A/N_

 _Although originally published on Archive of Our Own under the same title, the AO3 version was revised and developed with new passages to coincide with this FFNet debut._

 _I do not own Kanan and Hera._

* * *

He felt the little girl's eyes tracing the circular motions of his hand as he rubbed Hera's swollen belly. When you no longer had eyes, you could feel the presence of other eyes and where they aimed.

"What's it like?"

"What is what like, little luv?" Hera, relaxed against a propped-up pillow, inquired as her ungloved hand laid upon his circling hands, so they could jointly feel the baby stirring.

"What's it like being born?"

Of all the questions-she inherited Caleb Dume's youthful hyper-inquisitiveness-this was the most bizarre. He was more equipped for the "How do Mommies and Daddies create a baby?" question last week.

Before he deliberated on answering, Hera rescued him from the decision. "Well, no one ever remembers being born. You don't. I don't. Only parents..." Then the ungrudging but apprehensive potency of her glance dropped on him. "Or a parent remembers their child being born. I remember you being born, little luv."

"Daddy, what's it like me being born?" A few bedsprings squeaked as she mounted herself onto the mattress.

He twined his fingers between Hera's to savor the increasing pressure of her palm. "Ask your mother, I… wish I could have been there to see you." **_See,_** _why did he keep using that word?_ "Well, to _hear_ you cry. But I had Jedi business with the Skywalker." He refused Luke's kind urging to take a "leave of absence" upon learning of Hera's pregnancy (not to say that was a temptation), and he hoped to the Force that circumstances would allow him to be present for the birth of the second little co-pilot.

Without releasing his hand from Hera and her belly, he buckled his kneecaps to prepare them for the oncoming weight as the girl nested herself onto his lap, right into the space between the knees of his meditation posture.

His free hand patted her back. He could feel that she maintained her fixation on her mother's belly and the tumbling within.

She curled upon his lap. "Did your daddy see you born?"

He almost answered, _I hope,_ but could only sigh, recounting a quake in the Force mid-discussion with Skywalker (regarding prospective students) that wavered his focus and the implicit revelation that his daughter was born without him in attendance. "Maybe I like to think he did." This was not for himself really. He had no connection to his father, but he would think this Mr. Dume, assuming that was on his desires, would have wanted to be present for Caleb Dume's birth. But Okadiah back on Gorse was the closest he ever had to a father figure, one who treated him without judgment. Did Mr. and (or just) Miss Dume cried when Caleb emerged into the world?

He could detect the wee jounces of the baby's curling fists in Hera's belly. "I know my mother was there, at least. Mothers are always there at their child's birth." He considered the possibility that Mrs.-or Miss-Dume had Caleb in solitude, not the "solitude" when Hera gave birth in his absence, but "solitude" as in a "father permanently out of the picture" case. He vaguely recalled the mention of statistics (the numbers forgotten in the ashes of the Temple) about Jedi originated from mothers without husbands or known lovers who couldn't feed their children.

"Where's your mommy and daddy?" He hadn't explained to her yet that Old Jedi weren't allowed to know mommies and daddies so they could be raised by teachers and masters to follow. Those intel lied in untouched holocrons, kept out of Younglings reach. He knew he did allude to the "no attachment" verse over her bedside during the Code recitations (her pronunciation filtered through her limited vocabulary, "No A- _hatch_ -ment") but hadn't quite elaborated on how individual Jedi interpreted and reacted to said verse (he archived the bedtime story of Anakin Skywalker for later).

"Daddy, so where's your mommy and daddy?"

He deduced that this question was the equivalent of, "Where are you from?" He never exercised the interest, or didn't have time, to research his homeworld like the other Younglings, who adorned themselves in their cultural apparel for their robes.

"All I know is that I grew up under the roof of the Jedi Temple. I was raised by the masters." And nurse droids at infancy. "That's where I am from." The common question for outsiders was "Don't you Jedi feel like you're missing out, being cloistered there?" But he never felt anything "missing" then, being taught to let the Force fill out the emptiness left in their souls, though he would later reinterpret such notion, excluding the dogmatic "no romance," by letting Hera into his commitments.

"Do you miss your mommy and daddy?"

"No." He could do without Mrs. and Mr. Dume. He had no yearning. Like the majority of Younglings, he was bought up to the Temple so early that the memories of their faces swirled in a blur, summoned by fleeting idle curiosity-"I do wonder what my parents looked like," mentally popped up during lectures about familial attachments-but always indecipherable. The only possession he had of them was Caleb Dume, the name they-or maybe only his mother, that Mrs. or Ms. Dume-gave him.

When he stroked her cheek to see (still using that word) her expression, he could trace the hardening downwards angles of her frown. She will disagree with the Jedi protocol of nullifying infant Younglings' attachment to mothers and fathers-and siblings.

"I do not remember them."

Her reply rang like a rebuttal, a troubling tone. "But _I_ remember you and Mommy." It was a bit of challenge to decode her meaning. She didn't add, "When you're gone."

"I do not remember my parents because I was a baby when the Jedi recruited me into the Order." _Recruited._ It would be tricky to explain that the Order became your family but the old family must be forgotten, the implicit terms and conditions of the spiritual contract. "And I do not know where they are."

Whenever they placed her in Cham's arms to go on distant missions, those dreaded yet necessary "leave of absence" from domestic comforts, Kanan onto weeks-long missions with Skywalker, Hera onto flight missions to deliver rations to impoverished planets not yet recovered from the Empire, Cham would bemoan his helplessness when he couldn't calm down her night wailings.

He prepared himself for a, _but why did the Jedi take you away from your parents?_ He readied himself to explain that parents, even those that could afford to raise their offspring, thought it best for children to be raised by an honorable Order, to be fed and educated, to execute honorable civic duty, even if the career-the "destiny," as the masters defined it-entailed risk and zero contact with offspring. He didn't know what he would have done if he was a parent of that era tasked with that decision.

Instead, she ambushed him with "But don't your mommy and daddy miss you?"

"I suppose I'm in their thoughts." If they indeed survived the Clone Wars and the reign of the Empire… "That's enough for me. I hope that's enough for them." The weight of Hera's head rested upon his shoulder.

But he realized, if they did live (if his father had a consciousness of Caleb's existence), they would assume their Caleb perished somewhere and sometime in the Clone Wars. Might they, or one of them, have that hereditary Force-sensitivity? If Caleb had disobeyed Master's orders and was shot down beside her, would the Dumes, or only the Miss Dume, have felt it? Would they have detected that sharp dullening of the Force when ones loved one perished? Babies did not have the cognitive capacity to remember, but parents, or a parent, wouldn't forget. How long would Miss Dume have possessed the signature of her Caleb out there long after she surrendered him to the arms of Jedi? Did the sensation, the innate bloodline thread of connection, which diminished into a one-sided link when baby Caleb forgot her face, expired through time? Would the name Caleb only dissolve into a mental artifact?

Loading his head with improvised answers for any predicted inquiry, he stroked the girl's budding lekku.

He measured the child's silence through the peripheral noises: the density and pacing of Hera breathing upon his neck and the pitter-pattering heartbeats of the yet-to-be-born. When he perceived enough silence to be sure he wouldn't inadvertently interrupt an unforeseen question, he remarked, "I don't know why or how they were able to live without me."


End file.
